Ernest Lawrence
The Nobel Prize in Physics stands as the most prominent recognition Ernest Orlando Lawrence received during his career as a physicist and nuclear physicist working in the United States.
Lawrence was born on August 8, 1901, in Canton, and pursued an extensive formal education across multiple institutions before establishing himself in academic and scientific life. He studied at Augustana Academy and the University of South Dakota, then continued his education at the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, the University of Chicago, and Yale University. This broad educational path, spanning institutions across the Midwest and the Northeast, formed the foundation for his subsequent work in nuclear physics. He went on to serve as a university teacher, carrying his research orientation into his professional academic role.
The honors Lawrence accumulated across his career were numerous and varied in origin. In addition to the Nobel Prize in Physics, he received the Comstock Prize in Physics, the Elliott Cresson Medal, the Holley Medal, the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement, the Enrico Fermi Award, and the Dennis Gabor Medal and Prize. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, a designation that reflects the applied and technological dimensions of his contributions as a nuclear physicist, and he held standing as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Together these awards and affiliations document the range of recognition his work attracted over the course of his professional life.
Lawrence died on August 27, 1958, in Palo Alto, having been born fifty-seven years earlier in Canton. The Library of Congress Authorized Heading for his name — "Lawrence, Ernest Orlando, 1901-1958" — establishes the documentary record by which his work is catalogued and remains accessible to researchers consulting archives and library collections.
Quotes by Ernest Lawrence
The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work.
It never does much good to find out why you can’t; put your effort into what you can do.
I have gotten over feeling badly. We would be eternally miserable if our errors worried us too much because as we push forward we will make plenty more.
I am mindful that scientific achievement is rooted in the past, is cultivated to full stature by many contemporaries and flourishes only in favorable environment. No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid. In my own work this has been particularly true.
The atomic bombs will surely shorten the war, and let us hope that they will effectively end war as a possibility in human affairs.
It never does much good to find out why you can't; put your effort into what you can do.
Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere; and somewhere hearts are light; And somewhere men are laughing; and little children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville- great Casey has struck out.
We have reached the age, those of us to whom fortune has assigned a post in life's struggle, when beaten and smashed and biffed by the lashing of the dragon's tail, we begin to appreciate that the old man was not such a fool after all. We saw our parents wrestling with the same dragon, and we thought, though we never spoke a thought aloud, 'Why doesn't he hit him on the head?' Alas, comrads, we know now. We have hit the dragon on the head and we have seen the dragon smile.
It is a source of gratification to us all that we have been able to contribute a little to an understanding of the nucleus of the atom.